Tom Benjey's Weblog

The August 2023 edition of the College Football Historical Society journal includes a most interesting article and I’m not just saying that because it also includes one of mine. The piece I’m talking about has to do with the College All-Star Game of 1948. For those not old enough to remember these games, a group of the top college players played against the reigning NFL champion in Chicago before the start of the year’s football season. The coach of the AP mythical national champions led the collegians. This year it was Notre Dame’s Frank Leahy. This series ran from 1934 through 1974.

The pros were represented by the Chicago Cardinals, a team that seldom earned this honor. More unusual were the numbers of Notre Dame and Michigan players on the college roster: fourteen Irish and eight Wolverines. In those days, the single-wing reigned in Ann Arbor where the T-formation ruled in South Bend. Aficionados of each system extolled the virtues of their offense of choice. Leahy, a T-formation man, saw his chance to prove which was the better approach with so many highly skilled players of each system on his roster.

So, he split his team into two squads based on which formation they were accustomed to running. Thirty-three single wingers and twenty-nine from T-formation schools. He assigned assistants—his assistants for the game were head coaches from other schools—familiar with the single wing to coach that squad while he and assistants who used the T-formation coached the other one. He told the players he hadn’t decided which scheme to use in the big game against the pros and would have the squads play each other to determine which system he would use in the big game.

The contest was held on August 14, 1948 in front of a crowd of 23,450 wildly cheering fans at Northwestern’s Dyche Stadium. To find out what happened that day and six days later when the college boys went against the Cardinals in front of 101,220 spectators at Soldier Field, you’ll have to get your hands on the journal. To receive your own copy, email rayscfhs@msn.com or write:

• Ray Schmidt
• PO Box 6460
• Ventura, CA 93006

This entry was posted on August 9, 2023 at 6:43 am and is filed under Football, NFL, Pop Warner, Single-Wing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.